AGENDA
OR are your business applications working for you?
Once upon a time, when I was in Enterprise Sales, I had to manage hundreds of different companies and thousands of different contacts. At the ring of a phone call, I needed to know not only who was calling with more context than their "name", but also who they knew, who they respected, who influenced their decision making, who they didn't like. I needed to know when their budget renewed and how the current climate impacted that budget. I needed to know what frustrated them and what was available that they might not know about or who was available that could create a win/win.
I was also finding out new tidbits of information on an ongoing basis that was easy to forget.
The world is small.
I would go to a conference or local user group meeting, and I would meet someone who knew someone who I knew. They were at the same company, on the same baseball team or had recently published an article that everyone was talking about.
I could keep track of the hundreds of companies (or a few hundred), but when I started adding in the hundreds of contacts associated with those companies. I just couldn't do it.
As such I focused my career on technologies that could make my job easier, and I selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement and the Power Platform.
Here we are a few (okay more than a few) years later and I continue to still see that technology need at many companies. People using Outlook and Excel to try to remember the tiny details and to meet the goals that they need to meet. At one point you could go to a conference twice a year and get a good refresh. Yes, LinkedIn offers the alerts on who has changed jobs, but do you really have a great system that can show you your world and how it intermixes with the companies you work with?
All of that great organic data that drips in here and there from just living your passion or from just making a living. (hopefully they are the same for you) Do you really know?
PS: The above drawing took me less than 2 minutes to create. Waffle on that one ;)
Did you know that with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales you can pick your choice of methodologies? The Power Platform Model-Driven App is highly configurable offering three areas of refinement.
1) Configuration: A set of questions that can change the way the application works. These questions, no matter the answer, are all supported by the Microsoft Development team.
2) Customizations: An ability to add fields, tables, views, forms for data entry, business rules, charts, label changes, table name changes, business process flows and relationships to other tables. Customizations are also expected by the Microsoft development team and all customizations grow with the software as it continues to deepen with the Microsoft product teams efforts.
3) Extensions: Extensions come in when an Enterprise (or small or medium size business) works with a developer to add additional functionality to the platform. An extension is taking the standard code base and what is written by the Microsoft Development team and extending it to do even more that the thousands of features that come out of the box.
So back to Sales Methodologies and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. There are numerous different sales methodologies that can easily be met with Configuration and Customizations. Wording changes, Form changes, adding business process flows. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales can be your Sales Methodology App.
What? You don't have a sales methodology? EVEN an ORGANIC Sales can be supported. Look over your sales team members shoulders, what do they do to close the deal? Even if you don't have a formal methodology, if you are selling, there are processes in place.
Example of Formal or Informal Sales Methodologies and Processes
As sales technology continues to grow, we no longer need to depend on lightning speed typing skills to keep track of all that is happening around us. Voice to Text is everywhere, from your watch to your phone and on over to your computer.
The key is to review and address how you work on a regular basis. Have you been hesitating to update or upgrade? Will it make a difference?
The uncomfort of change is real and bigger for some, but also is the level of tolerance for habits that really are not worth continuing. During the slower months of summer, take time to consider "How you Work".
Copilot: A Whole New Way to Work (office.com)
I want to encourage everyone to take advantage of these two-custom created virtual events at the end of June hosted by Microsoft + Avanade. The focus is copilot in the world of the Microsoft Business Applications.
A demonstration
June 26th (10:00 PST) - Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement & Copilot
“Enhance productivity and end user experience.”
Copilot for Sales - Sales enriched experience.
Copilot for Service - Enhance customer experience.
Copilot for Field Service - Create and route work orders seamlessly.
June 27th (10:00 PST) - Dynamics 365 ERP & Copilot
“Enhance Productivity of a Business user across Finance, Procurement and inventory functions."
Copilot for Finance - Enhance AI based collections and increase productivity on financial reconciliations, and AP Invoice automation.
Copilot for Supply Chain - Improve Forecast Accuracy and inventory visibility.
Please register using the following URL:
https://lnkd.in/gYB-XJmW
One of my favorite ways to learn is to share knowledge. I find that all of the other perspectives I get from this exercise really help me shift and refine what I have learned.
In the last two years I have been under the fire house learning. It is both exciting, amazing and daunting when we consider how much more there is always to learn. It is also a twist for those of us who have years of experience. The experience makes a huge difference, but it also always has to be continually refined.
One of the first major learning tips is to get your head around the vocabulary quickly. It has served me well to think about the following.
The Power Platform, this is really an evolution to getting closer and closer to using the entire Microsoft Stack of awesome. The long loved deep integration to Office is now 100 times better AND there is also the deep integration to Azure and many of the new Azure functions.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 "Apps" are all Model Driven Power Apps on the Power Platform.
Power Automate (Flow) The ability to automate, respond and receive responses and an alignment/replacement or stepping stone to both work flows and logic apps and you can learn more here.
Power BI Much loved and amazing reporting and business intelligence and analytics and you can learn more here
Power Virtual Bots, Not only bots, but Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and you can learn more here and here.
One of the huge shifts and benefits for a sales person is when technology gets aligned so that keeping data current falls to the most logical location. Consider for instances a prospects name, company and job title. A shift is when this information is kept current by that specific prospect rather than the sales person following that prospect. The prospect updates their name, role and company information because it is beneficial to the work that they are doing. The sales person who has a relationship with this person, or who is following them, can then be a straight consumer of data managed by a logical source.
Now this isn't perfect .. not everyone updates their information even with the power of a product such as LinkedIn and Sales Navigator so technology still needs to take another step in validating that the data is current. A futuristic option on this will be when AI technologies can tap into larger or the largest data repositories and filter out what they need to validate a person's name, role and company. If we take this one step further we add address, telephone numbers, historical information.
Data exists, we can purchase this data, but we are not quite to the point where the data on a person is 100% transparent when we need it AND there are many reasons why this also sends chills up many a spine.
If we circle back to what is happening in the world of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales we find that Relationship Sales is a combination of the knowledge within LinkedIn and the Power of the Dynamics 365 platform.
Unifying the best of both worlds to further empower the business sales teams. It also uses AI Technology in addition to the combination of data. This takes this one step further.
At the Microsoft Business Applications Summit this week I had a chance to take a look at and discuss Microsoft Product Visualize. I loved seeing how it worked, but more importantly I had dug into the details of where data is stored and how is it created.
So first What is Microsoft Visualize?
Consider the Microsoft Dynamics Product Catalog. You have a list of products associated with an opportunity and each item has a description. This doesn't really offer the most efficient way to quickly grasp all that you want to know. We then consider the flat, 2D ability to add a picture. Great! Wonderful, but can we do more? This is where Product Visualize for Dynamics 365 comes into plan.
I have my Tablet (Surface/iPad/etc), I am at a client site and I am discussing an opportunity that includes a number of products. I might even have two similar products, because my prospect or client has not decided on what they want. Product Visualize offers not only a 3D Image of the product, but it offers the ability to show a full 360 Degree 3D View of the product depending on how the "user" (myself, the prospect or customer) moves the tablet.
So how does Product Visualize technically do this?
Product Visualize uses a product .glb file stored in an integrated SharePoint library. The library that can be configured when Dynamics 365 is setup and configured. The file contains the 3D model saved in GL Transmission Format (glTF). gITF offers the ability to store such information such as node hierarchy, cameras, materials, and animations and a GLB file is the binary version of .GLTF files.
Note: For those of you who are old hands at gITF and glb, please feel free to expand on this..
BUT how do we actually get the images and the data for the GLB file?
I have my product and I have Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement, but I don't have a glb file. This is where the growing momentum in partnerships between the new worlds within the graphical industries and the ever evolving world of customer engagement becomes a huge win/win.